Gentle reminder that oil companies knew climate change was coming in the 70s, and their response was to use tobacco lobby tactics to spread misinformation.
Media and politicians helped - and are still helping - them do it.
Media and politicians helped - and are still helping - them do it.
One of the reasons I believe our current political system is bankrupt. It can't do the right thing even when it is crystal clear.
Ya know, people said the same thing about tobacco. Their FUD tactics were effective though. They sewed enough doubt to squeeze a few extra decades of profit out of people, at the expense of millions of lives.
This is that but worse. And it's so, so sad that people here are missing that point and carrying water for the fossil fuel mass murderers.
As an European my only hope is that the EU does something that's mandatory for companies to do in a way that it has worldwide effect (like GDPR or repairability rules for instance).
IMHO a big problem with this debate is the austerity framing. Austerity is a political loser. Always has been, always will be. Frame something as requiring austerity and it's guaranteed to fail. It's not necessary either. Nuclear and renewable energy can power modern society and then some.
If it were that easy, it would have happened. Other sources of energy have downsides, such as price, convenience, portability, etc. Mainly price, I would assume. Which goes back to the original point, that if the thing people want most is to live in large homes in far flung suburbs with large pickup trucks and SUVs and vacations to tropical destinations, they are not going to vote for policies that make those things less possible.
If 50 years ago, we had voted to make gas $10/gallon, then maybe those alternatives would have been feasible to develop and implement. But even today, $5/gallon gas will cause the incumbent politicians to lose elections. No one is going to touch that issue and win.
This idea of automatic progress is one of the great fallacies of our time. Things don't get done unless action is taken. Progress is volitional and requires effort whether it's at the scale of a single individual or an entire global economy. If action is not taken the status quo prevails by inertia.
It might be cliche but I have to cite SpaceX and their reusable rocket cores as a classic example. Here is a video of a VTVL rocket called the DC-X created and flown in the early-mid 1990s:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39cjZTCay24
We could have had reusable rockets by 2000, but unfortunately the project was cancelled. Instead we endured another 10 years of paper studies supposedly "proving" that reusable rockets couldn't be economical. These studies were funded and produced by people with a financial vested interest in disposable rockets.
Nuclear and renewable energy absolutely can replace fossil fuels. There is no physical reason this can't happen and with scale they could be cost competitive or perhaps even cheaper. It's not happening because nobody is pushing it hard enough to overcome the inertia of vested interests and... well... plain old inertia.
Edit: another way of thinking of this kind of thing is the common "has anyone called the police?" scenario. Imagine someone gets shot on the street. A crowd of people gathers around. Nobody does anything because surely someone has called the police, so the victim dies waiting for help.
I am under the impression that there has been much R&D towards fossil fuel alternatives. Perhaps there could have been more investment from the government side, but it is 2022, and a fossil fuel Toyota Corolla still has no electric alternative in terms of the utility per price.
But innovation and technology take time, and resources, and are not foolproof to produce an alternative to all of fossil fuel’s uses. But more importantly, low fossil fuel prices keep demand for alternatives low, and demand for fossil fuel high.
The requisite action that has to be taken is reduction of use of fossil fuels, regardless of progress in alternatives. Nature does not owe us the excessive use of fossil fuels in the mean time.
It’s already happening, but it’s occurring too slow. There were efforts by smaller groups to convert the US to renewable energy since the 1970s. Around that time, there was even an effort by the US government to address it, and the US Naval Observatory famously published a book series detailing different technologies, such as wave power.
Simultaneously, this is also when the oil companies first started funding so-called “think tanks”, which were lobbying fronts to stop climate regulation. They were tasked with infiltrating the universities, the media, and finally the government, where they helped draft policies to stop climate change legislation. This is all academic and many books have been written about these efforts.
> imo its much easier politically to remove CO2 or geoengineer planet when shtf
I’ve been following the geoengineering debate since the early 1990s, when there were only a few people talking about it.
There are no working scientists that I know of that think this will solve the problem in time, with the major issue being the interregnum between the time the new technology goes online and the time it takes for the climate to stabilize. People generally get upset when I tell them this, but it is widely believed that this time period will take at least a /century/, which means in many cases, people will either have to move into shelters or even underground, work only at night, or migrate by the hundreds of millions to safer areas, depopulating entire areas of the world to survive.
This is the known reality, and most people refuse to confront it head on. In other words, no matter what technological magic you work, it will take 100 years to see the result, during which time humanity will face a bottleneck event. When these facts have been brought to the attention of leaders, time and time again, the people presenting them have been dismissed as alarmists and sent packing. This is not the way to prepare for the future.
the problem is more subtle than it just being slow. its the distributed nature of it. everyone must reduce their consumption also its unclear by how much, as developed nations have achieved much using their 'carbon budgets' but developing nations are yet to. or should it just be an even percent reduction per capita, what about disproportionate consumption by income segments. now you start to see the tragedy of the commons angle of it? same decision tree applies at all levels including states & cities. in the end you need just a few bad actors (bolsenaro for instance) for the majority of reductions to be offsetted.
the only way I can even imagine it work out in my head is if there is some sort of global carbon pricing & the gains from that are strictly limited to preservation & geoengineering works. I know you dont think geoengineering is workable but imo humanity is good at focused efforts like moon landing & manhatten project. for instance today cost to pull a pound of co2 from air is $100-200 but if scaledup and more R&D (i.e.. more money thrown at it) it can potentially fall below $10. at that point it is at least thinkable in terms of global economy.